Human resources (HR) directors across the public and private sectors have admitted challenges in overcoming resistance to digitalisation - and the use of artificial intelligence (AI) tools - among staff.
During a panel session at the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD) Scotland Annual Conference, there was consensus on the need to stress that automation of more mundane tasks can free people up to do more interesting parts of their job - which should not be at risk from the technology.
Jonathan Pender, deputy director of HR at NHS Lanarkshire, told the audience that across certain demographics, many are struggling with the introduction of tech.
"We were trying out Copilot [a Microsoft 'AI companion'] and an administrative assistant said 'that's going to replace my job', so some clearly still see it as a threat, but we had to explain that it's going to free them up to do more interesting things," he stated.
"There are people who've been with us for many decades and only know how to do thing on way, so we need to take people with us on that journey; we must get better at describing the benefits."
Katharine O'Callaghan, HR director in charge of the people transformation function at NatWest, said she's being challenged to think about jobs that don't necessarily even exist yet.
"How do we re-skill the workforce, helping them imagine different types of jobs that we can't imagine right now?" she asked, adding that prompting skills to get the best out of generative AI tools like ChatGPT are increasingly in demand.
Amanda Arrowsmith, people and transformation director at CIPD, who chaired the session, commented: "AI wont replace you, but someone using it might.
"People are looking for prompt engineers, which just wasn't a role two years ago... as HR professionals we're supposed to know what this all looks like now."
Kola Otekalu, a director of human resources at subsea engineering firm Oceaneering, emphasised the importance of tackling anxiety and anger about change within the workforce.
"Most employees agree that change is inevitable, but around 70% of all change initiatives still fail - so there's an underlaying emotion that's become known as 'change rage' - the process of denial, defensiveness and derailment.
"We must be focused on accepting that all change represents a source of loss of some kind, but that must be accepted in parallel with building new infrastructure; dealing with it to make sure less initiatives fail.
"HR managers will see more success if there's resilience and agility built in; bouncing forward rather than being set back," she added.
Back to the NHS, and Pender admitted to HR challenges around layers of bureaucracy, the expectations from the public, as well as oversight from government.
"We have well-known productivity-related issues, there are some difficult questions to ask," he stated, explaining that since the pandemic, the workforce has increased by roughly 10%, while people presenting at A&E has lowered slightly, but performance overall is still flagging.
"People are sicker than before the pandemic, absence is higher... so we're trying to get underneath what enables people to deliver the right level of care, removing barriers, trying to engage with those who can enable that change - the the whole system needs to work together," Pender continued, adding: The HR challenge is to coordinate a single people strategy to aim for the same goal, we had a shared mission during Covid, but replicating that culture is harder during 'peacetime'."
He noted that working collaboratively with trade unions and staff is key - hearing the voice of those that will be impacted by changes - and "getting the right messages to the right people at the right time".
O'Callaghan agreed with the collaboration point, and said that at NatWest change initiatives are increasingly data-driven, with feedback sought during all employee contacts with HR, in order to get a better sense of what's being done well, or not so well.
"We've got a 'colleague experience squad' of around 4,000 staff and they feed into things like changes we made to a legacy system connected to performance ratings - most people disliked it, as there was too much filling in online forms, so over the last year we've removed ratings and streamlined the system to focus on goal setting, getting feedback on what to talk about at check-in, what information to capture, etc," she explained.
O'Callaghan added that rather than work on the upgrade for years and then announce it to staff, it was done in four phases, with colleagues directly feeding into how the change was approached.
Pender was also keen on using data insights to driver change, pointing to work where staff sickness data was overlayed with demography, finding a correlation between shorter, but more frequent absences in the younger workforce, while older people were often off fewer times, but for far longer.
"This is an emerging issue for our ageing workforce - a real and present danger for capacity challenges," he said. "There are also socio-economic factors reflected generally in the data, so for instance our domestic workforce are sometimes from more deprived areas and often older due to not being able to retire earlier, so with that information we can target better interventions to those people.
"We can make things more relatable to their challenges - a consultant will have different needs from the porter, for instance - we've got everyone from people on the Real Living Wage to those earning six figures."
Pender said that the 22 NHS boards in Scotland generally try to use similar systems, which is often a good thing, but does present some restrictions for those trying to leverage technology, who won't always have the autonomy to innovate.
"We're in the bizarre position where got the right people, and actually enough funding, but not necessarily the infrastructure to embed things like AI, or automation and digitisation of processes.
"We're still pretty paper heavy, but hopefully in HR we can make the case for change and then try to embed it more broadly across the system."
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